Cal offers full courses on YouTube - but not for credit

One hitch: You can't earn a degree just yet because no credits are given

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, October 3, 2007

You don't have to be a UC Berkeley student to be educated like one.

UC Berkeley has begun to publish its lectures on YouTube, the first university to team up with the video-sharing site to offer full courses online. It's the latest move to bring higher education to the masses through the Web.

UC Berkeley began experimenting with broadcasting classes online as early as 1995 and joined dozens of other colleges last year in distributing free podcasts through Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store. Now the school hopes to attract an even larger audience by establishing a dedicated channel on one of the most-trafficked sites on the Internet.

"YouTube is an extension of our reach," said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of webcast.berkeley.edu, the program that gathers the lectures and makes them available online. "We feel strongly as a public institution that we should be providing a window into the intellectual riches of our university."

Other institutions have used YouTube to broadcast occasional classes, but UC Berkeley is the first to offer full courses online, school officials and YouTube said Wednesday.

Because the school uploads the videos manually, they all come from lectures given last year or in the spring. Hubbard said the school hopes to automate the process by next fall, so the lectures can go up on YouTube faster, as well as add at least three more courses on the site before the end of this year. On webcast.berkeley.edu, lectures are available in a matter of a day or two.

"If you have a good attention span, you can learn a lot," said Paul Adem, an architect in Southern California who became one of the new channel's earliest subscribers. The 1989 UC Berkeley graduate said he watched a Peace and Conflict Studies class and Diamond's human anatomy course on YouTube.

UC Berkeley already was posting videos on Google, which acquired YouTube last year for $1.65 billion.

Before the videos were shifted to YouTube, they were viewed 1.3 million times and downloaded 700,000 times. On UC Berkeley's local site, the school's lectures were seen 4.3 million times last year. And on iTunes, some 2 million podcasts have been downloaded since April 2006.

The school has equipped 20 classrooms to record lectures and captures about 50 classes each semester, or about 3 percent of the course catalog.

Professors who use the classrooms are asked to participate.

Muller, one of the earliest professors to do so, said his lectures have been seen or heard by people in 72 countries as far flung as Tibet and Croatia.

And to keep his students from simply skipping class and just getting his lecture online, he gives occasional pop quizzes.

"I have a deep belief we're on the edge of something," Muller said. "The technology in the past wasn't quite there, but now it's here and it's going to transform a great deal in education."

Chris Anderson, an applied science and technology graduate student, said he occasionally watched lectures online last year if he missed class.

"It's a great resource to put the lectures online, not just for students but for the community at large," he said. But at the same time, he suspects that attendance dipped because students knew they could catch up online.

"I know several students who would have come to class more if the class hadn't been Webcast," he said. "When a class has a lot of interaction, it's nice to have as many students there as possible. That takes away from that experience when people aren't there."

Get a college education - for free

UC Berkeley has become the first university to offer full courses on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Topics include bioengineering, peace and conflict studies - even Physics for Future Presidents.

Some 200 clips, representing eight semesterlong courses, are available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Additional lectures are available at the university's own site, webcast.berkeley.edu. Audio and video podcasts of classes also are available on iTunes.

It's all free.

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